Posts tagged Microsoft

If you are like me, then probably you already familiar with Forums and their uses (other than searching Pornos ofcourse ) … if you look at the history you will find that forums came to existence not too early … but their another form was here since early ages of Internet … it was is called NewsGroups …

Newsgroups are basically collection of messages posted by many users. They use NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol) at application layer. So, in a way they are discussion groups or if I dare to say Forums … and believe me despite of present Twittered and Facebooked culture, there is a lot big user group still use these ancient technology of communication … when I first time used it, it felt more geeky to me … (I mean it was geeky to even a geek ) … we can do almost anything that we are doing with all these Web 2.0 tools. and torrents (again other than searching Porn )… And what I liked about them is access to almost all posts / reposts of day and you don’t need to search for answers like you do in forums. Or the greatest benefit (atleast for me) is, if you are just browsing all questions to gain more understanding of practical problems and their solutions from all across the user base then its more easy to do in Newsgroup then Forums…

I have used couple of different newsgroup readers (all are free), and the two I liked the most are Windows Live Mail and Grabit … both has really good features to customize feel and look … with ability to control.

I will show few shots of How to Setup Newsgroup in Grabit .. actually, its pretty straight forward. Simply grab Grabit … and install it. Now, when you will run it at first screen it will ask to add News Server, but don’t do that instead click cancel and delete that default news server (because it won’t let you rename it !!)… then create new server, add profile name and Host name of your server … also feed ID and PWD if your server need them.

If you have not heard about a website by MSFT called … Dreamspark .. & you are a student then this post is just for you. Actually Dreamspark itself is a program sponsored by Microsoft to provide students free software and tools which are used by professionals for development … and designing. If you have looked at this site, they really have great tools for absolutely no cost like… Windows Server 2008/2003 std edition ($745 @ Amazon), Visual Studio 2005/2008/2010 Professional edition ($723 @ Amazon), Expression Studio 4 Ultimate Edition ($558 @ Amazon) or SQL Server 2008 Dev. edition ($54 @ Amazon) … if you are a student then you will really know that how it is great to have these kind of software for free. Actually other than that, they offer many other software for free like Virtual PC, Game Studio, Robotics Dev. Studio, Multipoint, Embedded CE etc.